On Mon, 4 Nov 2002 23:21:07 -0800, "Paul Tauger" wrote:

[...]
>The number of
>pixels is, essentially, irrelevant to the quality of the video image.
>MiniDV for NTSC (the US television standard) uses a 720 x 480 pixel image.
>For the most part, increasing the number of pixels beyond this has no effect
>on image quality (there are considerations like subpixel sampling, but I'll
>ignore that for the moment). The increased number of pixels is relevant
>ONLY for still imaging.
[...]

Actually, this is not true...
The image taken from the CCD(s) is not fixed at 720x480,
but is an analogue signal, and increasing its resolution
does improve the resolution of the final image. With Mini-DV
and its variants, the absolute maximum horizontal resolution
is about 540 TV-lines; improving the resolution ahead of the
translation from analogue to digital (whether by improving
the lens, the CCD resolution, or processing - or all three)
results in a closer approximation of the 540-line resolution
limit (though reaching that limit requires infinitely-high
resolution...;-). The resolution differences between various
similar camcorders with similar-sized CCDs of different
pixel-counts can be easy to see
(see: www.David-Ruether-Photography.com/camcorder--comparison.htm) -
but the resulting images from the higher pixel-count camcorders
often do have unpleasant artifacting (and more restricted
low-light range), along with their sharper and sometimes
less-noisy images. There are both negative and positive
effects on the 720x480 DV image from increasing CCD pixel
count, which are quite evident in the final image...